helping small business owners achieve the success they deserve

Tag Archives: social media marketing

Is enagement up and reach is down? Or is your reach up and engagement is down? It doesn’t matter. If you’re reading this blog post, you’re concerned and smart enough to keep Facebook working for you.

The dizzying daily requirement of keeping up with the temperament of the fickle 10-year-old that Facebook is can seem like too much. Is Facebook even worth it anymore? The short answer is yes.

Do you need to spend a few dollars a week in paid posts? Maybe.

The fact may be that organic reach is down across the board, but engagement is up. Less people may be seeing your posts, but the one’s that do are people that are inherently more interested in them and their engagement shows it. Just so long as you keep engaging them with high quality content. (No more fuzzy pictures, text only posts or any of the other big NO-NOs.) These aren’t your personal friends. (At least I hope not — just like your business, no one has enough friends to keep them in business.) They need a real reason to like, share, click or otherwise do whatever you want and need them to do.

finally let go of the boring self-promotion and 2) trust Facebook and its algorithms.

Easier said than done on both points.”

Better engagement will increase your reach so that should be your focus, Better reach will increase your fan base or at least create new customers for your business. I hadn’t paid for a boost in a while until yesterday and it was $5 well spent. Depending on the value of a new customer for your specific business, reaching an extra thousand people to get ten new customers might be the greatest and easiest ROI you can find.

There has been a tremendous amount of backlash concerning the changes to Facebook EdgeRank, the new algorithm and the semi-valid argument that “I worked hard (and/or paid) for all these Likes and now my Fans aren’t seeing my posts.”

That’s fair, but you have to take a hard look at what kind of content you’re posting.

Is it engaging?

Will your fans find it useful, entertaining and welcome in their Feed?

If so, keep doing what you’re doing and your engagement should rise. Do you need a paid ad or a boosted post? Maybe. Maybe not. But you definitely need to put in the effort and be willing to experiment. If two or three well-optimized posts a week aren’t getting you the numbers you need and you have the budget, try some super targeted paid posts to see if you can build it that way. If your content just isn’t interesting, you may really have to think outside the box like Morgan Miller Plumbing, but you don’t have to spend a fortune unless you can afford it and you shouldn’t until you confirm that it works.

That said, what is the value of a new customer for your business? If it’s a lot more than $5, then I recommend you spend that on a targeted Boost. The chances of an acceptable ROI seem pretty good, right? Try it, use the extensive analytics (Facebook calls them “Insights”) to see what is and isn’t working and give it at least a month.

I understand the frustration of seemingly losing a “free” advertising channel, but how long can anything like that last. Engaging content always mattered, but it just wasn’t as crucial until every small business on the planet started clogging up News Feeds with SPAM, crap or SPAMMY crap. The stakes are just higher now and using best practices (and a bit of your advertising budget if you have it to spare) will keep Facebook for Business working as an extremely valuable marketing tool for your business.

Disclaimer: I am a small business owner and not affiliated with Facebook, Google, Aviary, Justin Timberlake or anyone but my own clients. These best practices are what I have learned from using Facebook for the last six years and may not work for everyone or every business.

I welcome any comments or suggestions because I’m trying to figure this all out just like you.